Instead of contenting themselves with the use of the language with which they were familiar in everyday speech as the medium of their written thoughts, they insisted on harking back to the earlier classical period, consciously modelling their phraseology and style upon authors who had lived and died a thousand years earlier. No great art was ever produced by such conscious imitation. Great art is essentially spontaneous, never consciously imitative; the epoch-making works are done in the vernacular by artists whose first thought is to give expression to their spontaneous feelings and emotions, unhampered by tradition. It was thus that Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, and Aristophanes wrote; and if Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Livy, and Tacitus were more conscious craftsmen, somewhat in the same measure were they less great as artists.
But the Byzantine writers were rather to be compared with the Alexandrians of the age of the Ptolemies. They were far more scientific than their predecessors and proportionately less artistic. As grammarians they analysed and criticised the language, insisting on the retention of those chance forms of speech which the masters of the earlier day had used spontaneously. The critical spirit of the grammarian found its counterpart everywhere in the prevalence of the analytical rather than the synthetic cast of thought. As the masters of the past were the models, so were their stores of knowledge the chief sources on which to draw. What Aristotle had said must be considered the last word as regards physical knowledge. What the classical poets and historians had written must needs be copied, analysed, and praised as the final expression of human thought. Men who under different auspices and in a different atmosphere might perhaps have produced original works of some significance, contented themselves with elaborating anthologies, compiling dictionaries and encyclopædias, and epitomising chronicles of world history from the ancient sources. It is equally characteristic of the time that writers who did attempt creative work found prose romance the most congenial medium for the expression of their ideals. Even this measure of creative enthusiasm chiefly marked the earliest period of the Byzantine era and was stifled by the conservatism of the later epoch.
A BRIEF SURVEY OF THE SOURCES
But if the reminiscent culture of the Byzantine Empire failed to produce an Herodotus, a Thucydides, or a Livy, it gave to the world, nevertheless, a line of historians and chronologists of the humbler class, beginning with Procopius the secretary of Justinian’s general, Belisarius, and ending with Ducas, Phrantzes, Laonicus Chalcocondyles, and Critobulus, the depicters of the final overthrow of Constantinople, who have left us a tolerably complete record of almost the entire life of the Eastern Empire. A list of these historians—numbering about half a hundred names—has been given in our general bibliography of Rome in Volume VI.
Here we shall add only a very brief résumé of the subject, naming the more important authors. For the later period of the undivided Roman Empire and the earlier Byzantine epoch we have, among others, the following works: the history of the war with Attila, bringing the story of the empire to the year 474, by Priscus, a Thracian, and the continuation of his history to the year 480 by Malchus of Philadelphia; the important history of Zosimus, which we have had occasion to quote in an earlier volume; and, most important of all, the historical works of Procopius of Cæsarea in Palestine. The last-named author was, as already mentioned, the secretary of Justinian’s famous general, Belisarius. He accompanied that general on many of his campaigns and apparently was associated with him on very intimate terms. This association, together with the character of his writings, has caused Procopius to be spoken of rather generally in later times as the Polybius of the Eastern Empire,—a compliment not altogether unmerited.
His works are by far the most important of the Byzantine histories, partly because of their intrinsic merit and partly because of the character of the epoch with which they deal. The more pretentious of his works has two books on the Persian War, two on the war with the Vandals, and four on the Gothic war. Curiously enough, another work ascribed to Procopius, and now generally admitted to be his, deals with the lives of Justinian and Theodora and to some extent with that of Belisarius himself, in a very different manner from that employed in the other history just mentioned. This so-called secret history was apparently intended for publication after the author’s death; it therefore gives vent to the expression of what are probably the true sentiments of the author, showing up the character of his patrons in a very different and much less complimentary light from that in which they are depicted in the earlier work. As an illustration of the difference between the diplomatic and the candid depiction of events this discrepancy of accounts coming from the same pen is of the highest interest. The moral for the historian—vividly illustrative of Sainte-Beuve’s famous saying that history is a tradition agreed upon—need hardly be emphasised.
Among the later Byzantine historians the names of John Zonaras, of Nicetas Acominatus, of Nicephorus Gregoras, occur as depicters of the events of somewhat comprehensive periods; Agathias, Simocatta, Epiphaneia, Anna Comnena, and George Phrantzes as biographers or writers on more limited epochs. Of these Anna Comnena in particular is noteworthy because her life of her father Alexius I has been spoken of as the only really artistic historical production of the period. It is popularly known as having supplied Sir Walter Scott with the subject and some of the materials for his last romance, Count Robert of Paris. But most noteworthy of all is the fact that this is the first important historical production, so far as is known, that ever came from the pen of a female writer.
The list of chronologies or epitomes of world history includes the Chronicon Paschale, and the works of Georgius Syncellus, Malalas, Cedrenus, Michael Glycas, and Constantine Manasses. In some respects more important than any of these were the collections of excerpts from ancient authors which were made by Stobæus, by Photius, and by Suidas. These have preserved many fragments of the writings of historians of antiquity that would otherwise have been altogether lost. A very noteworthy collection of excerpts, comprising in the aggregate a comprehensive history of the world made up from the writings of the Greek historians, forms one portion of the encyclopædia which the emperor Constantine (VII) Porphyrogenitus—himself a writer of some distinction—caused to be compiled in the tenth century. This work contained extracts, often very extensive, from the writings of most of the Greek classical historians. It was apparently very popular in the Middle Ages, and has been supposed to be responsible for the loss of many of the works from which it made excerpts. Unfortunately, the encyclopædia itself has come down to us only in fragments; but, even so, it gives us excerpts from such writers as Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Diodorus, Nicholas of Damascus, Appian, and Dion Cassius, and of numerous Byzantine histories that are not otherwise preserved.
Taken together, even the extant portions of the Byzantine histories make up a very bulky literature. Being produced in this relatively recent time, a correspondingly large proportion of it has been preserved. Not, indeed, that many of the original manuscripts of the Byzantine historians have come down to us, but they appear to have been copied very extensively by the monks of western Europe, who found in them an interest which the classical writings often failed to arouse. The very fact that so many of these writings epitomise ancient history furnishes, perhaps, the explanation of this popularity. In the day when the reproduction of books was so laborious a process, condensation was naturally a merit that appealed to the bookmaker. Hence, as has been suggested, the epitome was often made to do service for the more elaborate original work, which latter was allowed to drop altogether out of view. But the modern world has not looked upon the Byzantine writings with the same interest. For the most part they had never been translated into modern European languages, and the original texts have been collated, edited, and printed in comparatively recent times.